"The sad thing is that I feel so boring because 'Twilight' is literally how every conversation I have these days begins - whether it's someone I'm meeting for the first time or someone I just haven't seen in a while. The first thing I want to say to them is, 'It's insane! And, as a person, I can't do anything!'"

"This weird thing happens when you're in a movie that has some level of success. People start offering you all kinds of things, and they just expect you to do them because they'll be good for your career. It's not about the project's integrity or anything like that."

"I like making pies. I have a bunch of fruit trees in my backyard. My loquat tree sprouted, and I like making loquat pie. They're really hard to peel and everything, and it took me forever, but they make the best pies. They're amazing."

"I have a great family by the way, but you need to find people who can pull something out from you that might be otherwise unseen."

"My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969."

"Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities."

"The perfection of our union, especially our commitment to equality of opportunity, has been a story of constant striving to live up to our Founding principles. This is what Abraham Lincoln meant when he said, 'In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free - honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.'"

"At some point, I would like to write a book and other things, but I work best when there is some sort of deadline in my own mind, but not when fifty people or fifty million people are breathing down the back of my neck."